Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Robotic chair

Its legs look more 'natural' than this stair-climbing chair and a lot safer than this robotic arm ride (with video). But it still has a very robotic motion - I'd like to see a chair with a more dynamic gait like BigDog. Like Asimo, this chair looks like it is doing a lot of work tracking and controlling every joint.

Biological organisms don't use so much feedback, their 'hardware' is designed to walk or run fluidly with minimal sensory input and output. RunBot (with video) is a good example of an artificial system like that, but scaling up to a large free-standing robot is tough.